AdAge: Two Years of Life (at least) for The Times

A year ago, the few of us who raised the question of whether The New York Times Company might be in financial difficulty were dismissed as dwellers in the lowly “echo chamber of the blogosphere.” *

That was okay; it goes with the territory, so to speak, even though there were hard numbers at the center of our analysis, as opposed to any ideological bent or a built-in bias against the Times.

(On that score, for the record, I’m a loyal subscriber and I love the paper, despite all of its flaws. But many have understandably developed a deep antipathy toward the gray old lady, partly due to its serious breaches of journalistic standards in recent years — such as Judy Miller’s unethical role in promoting the invasion of Iraq, or last year’s campaign hit piece suggesting John McCain was having an affair with a female lobbyist.)

Add to these the collapse of the newspaper’s traditional business model — it is projected that advertising revenue for The Times will have fallen by 34 percent over the period from 2000 to 2011 — and you have the essence of the financial problems that started becoming visible around this time last year.

Still, even that shrinking pie should produce $2.2 billion for the Times owners in 2012, which ought to be the basis for a serious media company going forward, if management takes the right steps now.

Which brings us to this week’s take on The Times’ future from a source presumably more credible than any individual blogger — Advertising Age.  In what can best be described as a back-handed complement, the trade magazine  headlines its piece, “Why the New York Times Co. Will Be in Business Until at Least 2012.”

The article examines all of the key issues, from the exorbitant interest (14 percent) demanded on his quarter-billion loan by Mexican investor Carlos Slim, to massive debt repayments coming due in 2011 and 2015.

After parsing all of this data, the authors of the piece, Nat Ives and Bradley Johnson come to the conclusion that with cost-cutting and selling off assets (like the Boston Globe), the Times will be able to squeak by the next big deadline to pay down a $220 million revolving credit facility in June 2011.

But then, on a more somber note, the authors note  that a much larger challenge awaits the Sulzberger team, in 2015, when an additional $500 million in notes will come due.

* private email from a reader in response to one of my early NYT posts.

[Note: Image from AdAge.]

[Thanks to Thierry Lamouline for alerting me to the AdAge piece.]